Eat my Thoughts

The producers at Triple J must have known they were going to get some serious heat for their decision to move their Hottest 100 Countdown to the day after Australia Day. The easier choice would have been to shirk the issue for a few more years until public support was absolutely overwhelming, but they made the tougher and better choice. Kudos to all involved.​And cue the outrage. The aggrieved commentary came from all angles including Communications Minister, Mitch Fifield (I'll come back to him later) and any number of critics, many of whom may not have actually cared much about the Hottest 100, and probably didn’t listen to it, up until now.

It takes a fair effort for David ‘Hypocrisy’ Leyonhjelm to find a human being more repugnant than he, but he hit the motherlode when he found Milo Yiannopoulos lurking in some dark corner of the internet. I thought we might have seen the end of Milo as an alt-right posterboy after his paedophilia scandal, but I underestimated (for want of a better word) the alt-right. These extremists will pretty much ignore anything when it suits them, including child abuse, as we are seeing with the case of Roy Moore.​So I guess in hindsight it is no real surprise to see Milo creeping back into the public spotlight. And the fit with Leyonhjelm is obvious. A self-titled provocateur and a self-styled champion of freedom of speech. So you can be sure what they have to say is going to be both revolting and disingenuous.

To say that the situation in Manus Island is awful is a massive understatement. Despite this a large portion of the population seem distressingly okay with it.

I realise that the issue of border security and refugees attempting to get to this country by sea is a complex one; and I suspect that this- along with some particularly vicious exploitation for political purposes- is a complicating factor in why many people don’t get as upset as I might expect over the treatment of these refugees.

But to me, it comes down to a pretty simple question. Does anyone really think the unfortunate refugees on Manus Island deserve this kind of abuse?

​The refugees are yet to be charged with a crime because they haven’t committed one. And yet they have languished in a prison camps for four and half years and provided with little medical or psychological treatment (a few have even died for lack of such treatment).

Well that is a huge relief. With the postal survey confirming a vast majority of Australians believe in fairness and equality, social media has erupted with joy. For members of the LGBTIQ community especially, the prospect of the anti-equality campaign winning must have been an awful thing to contemplate, so I get the emotion around the occasion, but for me the main feeling is one of relief and having cleared the first possible stumbling block.